Managing Leadership^®

Just a short while ago I was speaking with a doctor practicing Western-style medicine in a hospital equipped and administered in a Western fashion in a non-Western country. He offered some advice that was distinctly, and to my view quaintly, local. I smiled and noted it. He evidently didn’t find my remark to be particularly quaint.

He observed, strikingly, that America is not known for its famous doctors or high standard of medicine. “We have always had better doctors,” he said. “But it used to be only you who had the technology. Now we have it also.”

I did not find this to be a convincing assessment of the situation. At one time, though, I may have been able to accept that it was at least arguable, after a fashion. But as it happens, I had already observed something that inured me to this kind of defensiveness:

I was in another country in this same region consulting with an organization that had purchased some cutting edge American equipment. We taught its employees how to prepare and use it. They were sharp, picked everything up quickly, and were quite proficient at the end of the training period. Job done.

But later when we came back to re-certify them, the equipment had succumbed to a poor storage environment and a complete lack of maintenance. It had not been put through its paces or checked, and neither the technicians nor the users had kept up their own training.

Moreover, most of them had been reassigned or left employment altogether, without replacements being trained. Indeed, many of those prepared as trainers were in those categories. As a result, there was no one left who could restore the equipment to operating condition, or trainers who could develop new maintenance technicians and users.

We were back to square one. We looked at them asking how this could have happened. But they just looked back at us, asking the same question. We attributed the breakdown to their failure to understand how to maintain the technology. They attributed it to a shortcoming in the quality of the “technology” they had been sold.

This outfit, too, was filled with people who, like the doctor, felt they were really superior as individuals and as a people to us; all they needed was the technology. And we tried to give it to them.

But the incident revealed clearly that technology is not a piece of equipment or a training manual. It is an artifact of the culture that produced it. The two - a culture and its technology - are inextricably bound up one in the other.

Now, this isn’t to say that technology transfer is impossible, or that there aren’t cultures entirely capable of comprehensively adopting alien technologies, making them fully their own.

But what it does mean is that if a culture proves an inhospitable soil for that alien technology to thrive in, it will not thrive. Technology does not issue from a shipping container, or a translated owner’s manual. Consumers of technology don’t own it - only those who appreciate the other side of the console, of the button, who can maintain and develop both the mechanical and human sides of it truly possess the technology.

It is worthwhile to be alert to this.

Have you, especially those of you who have worked internationally - across any cultural frontier in either direction, by the way - observed this? Have you experienced it from the technology side, or the culture side? Have you seen it, for example, with management art or science?

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Today’s tip: Speaking of frank opinions frankly stated, please see this thoughtful piece by Michael Wade, the Execupundit, about honest - and not-so-honest - confrontations.

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